“我们也应该感到愤怒。以我们的名义，一个女人遭受了酷刑。”致命注射原本是我们否认死刑现实的一种方式。派克的经历向我们揭示了死刑的真实面貌。克里斯塔·派克曾要求被处以绞刑。在9月30日那次失败的致命注射执行前几周，她不仅存活下了两剂致死量的巴比妥类药物——戊巴比妥，还因此被送进医院。此前，派克和她的法律团队已经对田纳西州的执行程序提出了挑战。
‘We should be angry, too. In our name, a woman was tortured.’Lethal injection was a way for us to deny the reality of capital punishment. Pike’s experience shows us what it is hrista Pike had asked to be hanged. In the weeks before her botched execution by lethal injection on 30 September, in which she survived two lethal doses of barbiturate pentobarbital and had to be hospitalized, Pike and her legal team had challenged Tennessee’s execution protocol.
该州的致命注射方案此前就曾失败过。5月，托尼·卡鲁斯也被送往田纳西州的死刑执行室，但由于狱方难以找到静脉，他最终活了下来。在派克案中，她的律师认为，致命注射方案很可能再次失败。
The state’s lethal injection regimen had failed before. In May, Tony Carruthers was also sent to Tennessee’s death chamber, only to leave alive after prison officials struggled to find a vein. In Pike’s case, her lawyers argued, the lethal injection protocol was likely to fail again.
他们还指出，派克本身也存在静脉问题；如果她像卡鲁斯那样遭受类似的折磨——狱方在一个小时内多次（超过十几次）刺穿她俯卧的身体，只为尝试注射药物——那么派克漫长而严重的创伤史，将使这一过程构成违宪的酷刑。
She also had vein issues, they said; if she was subjected to an ordeal like Carruthers’, in which prison officials punctured their prone prisoner more than a dozen times over the course of an hour in an attempt to administer the drug, Pike’s history of trauma, which is lengthy and acute, would serve to make the experience unconstitutionally torturous.
而原本用于处决派克的戊巴比妥，也存在导致不必要痛苦死亡的风险。
Pentobarbital, the drug that was set to be used to kill Pike, also risked a needlessly painful death.
“据说这种药物会带来极其严重的灼痛，”在预定执行日期仅几周前的一次录音采访中，派克说道，“这听起来让我很害怕，因为他们在谈论这种药时用了‘Draino’（一种管道清洁剂）这个词。一想到要窒息，还要被自己体内的体液和血液淹没，我就觉得非常可怕。”正是为了避免这种折磨，派克才请求改为被绞颈至死。但她的请求被拒绝了。据目击者称，在田纳西州未能成功处决她时，从执行室可以听到派克抱怨手臂传来灼烧般的疼痛，她形容那种感觉仿佛手臂即将爆裂。
“The drug supposedly burns very bad,” Pike said in a taped interview just weeks before her scheduled execution. “And so that sounds scary to me because they used the word Draino in speaking about this drug, and the thought of suffocating and drowning on my own bodily fluid and blood isn’t very appealing to me.”It was to avoid this ordeal that Pike requested to be hanged by the neck until dead instead. Her request was denied. From the execution chamber during Tennessee’s failed attempt to kill her, witnesses said that they could hear Pike complaining about a burning pain in her arm, which felt, she said, like it was about to burst.
在纳什维尔一家医院因行刑未遂而昏迷插管近一周后，派克现已苏醒并能说话。她的双臂在行刑过程中严重受伤，无法完全使用，但即便如此，她仍被镣铐固定在病床上。由于州方实施的过量药物作用，她仍处于“意识模糊”状态，目前尚不清楚她能否完全恢复认知功能，医生们正在评估其脑损伤的情况。
After nearly a week of being unconscious and intubated at a Nashville hospital after her failed execution attempt, Pike is now awake and talking. Her arms are severely injured from her execution attempt and not fully usable, but she’s still shackled to her hospital bed anyway. She still remains “foggy” from the effects of the state-administered overdose, and it’s unclear whether she will recover full cognitive function as doctors assess the state of her brain damage.
但她记得田纳西州试图杀害她却未能得逞的那些时刻。据报道，她非常愤怒。
But she remembers the moments when Tennessee tried and failed to kill her. She is reportedly very angry.
在许多死刑案件中，关于被定罪者是否有罪，以及审判和上诉程序是否公正，确实存在疑问。
In many death penalty cases, there are real questions about the factuality of a condemned person’s guilt or the fairness of their trial and appeals process.
但在派克案中，情况则有所不同：1995年，当时18岁的派克（现年50岁）将19岁的同学科琳·斯莱默引诱至一片树林中，并与同伙——她当时17岁的男友——一起对其施以酷刑，持续约半小时，最后用一块混凝土砸碎其颅骨将其杀害。斯莱默的母亲一直是要求处死派克的最坚定倡导者之一，据报道，她对杀害女儿的人得以存活感到极度愤怒。
That is less true in Pike’s case: there is no factual doubt that in 1995, when she was 18, Pike, now 50, lured her 19-year-old classmate Colleen Slemmer into a wooded area, and with an accomplice, Pike’s 17-year-old boyfriend, tortured her for about half an hour before finally killing her by smashing her skull in with a piece of concrete. Slemmer’s mother has been a particularly vocal advocate for Pike’s execution, and is reportedly furious that her daughter’s killer has survived.
受害者及其家属的意愿应当在我们对正义的理解中占据关键地位。没有人比那些遭受暴力的人更了解暴力的含义与影响。
The wishes of victims and their families should be crucial to what our understanding of justice means. No one knows better the meaning and significance of violence than the people who it is inflicted on.
但同样必须承认的是，派克的刑事审判并未考虑她人生中可能具有解释性（即便未必能减轻罪责）的因素——例如，她在童年时期长期遭受可怕、反复且严重的性暴力和身体虐待，最终才犯下谋杀罪。
But it is also true that Pike’s criminal trial did not take into account factors in her life that might have explanatory, if not mitigating, power – such as the reality that she committed murder at the end of a childhood that had been marked by horrific, repeated, and severe sexual and physical violence.
而且，当我们评估正义究竟为何时，确实必须思考的不仅是：什么样的结果对受害者而言最具意义、最令人满意，还要思考：什么样的结果最能体现我们的价值观，并履行我们作为国家所应承担的责任。按照这一标准，死刑始终未能及格。它并非真正实现了正义，而更像是将整个社会拉低到了最恶劣罪犯的层次。
And it is true, too, that when we assess what justice looks like, we must ask not only what would be most meaningful and satisfying for victims but also what best reflects our values and meets our obligations as a state. By that metric, the death penalty has always failed. It does not mete out justice so much as lower the collective community to the level of its worst perpetrators.
过去，致命注射曾让我们得以否认这一点。这一程序最初在美国制定，并于20世纪70年代末首次用于执行死刑。它旨在取代早期的国家处决方式，例如毒气室、电椅和行刑队，被宣传为一种更具尊严、更文明，且据称更少痛苦的杀人方式。
Lethal injection used to be a way for us to deny this. The protocol was developed in the US and first adopted for executions in the late 1970s. It was meant to replace older methods of state killing, such as gas chambers, electric chairs and firing squads, offering what was positioned as a more dignified and civilized, and supposedly less painful, way of murdering a human being.
然而，致命注射实际上却将死刑的残酷性披上了医学的外衣，使其支持者得以以一种看似礼貌的方式否认这种惩罚的本质。
What lethal injection did instead was medicalize the death penalty’s brutality, allowing its proponents a kind of polite denial of what the punishment actually is.
派克的经历向我们揭示了其真实面目：它充满暴力、残暴与残忍。无论医学手段如何试图否认或掩盖这一点，它都是痛苦的；它多余且违背了正义的需求，同时也会贬低所有参与其中的人。
Pike shows us what it really is. It is violent, brutal and cruel. It is painful, no matter how much medical science is used to deny or obscure this; it is superfluous and contrary to the needs of justice, and it degrades those who engage in it.
很长一段时间里，我认为死刑的危险性在于其不可逆转性——它可能导致无辜者被永久剥夺生命，犯下无法挽回的错误。而事实确实如此：美国历史上已有过处决无辜者的案例。
For a long time, I thought of the death penalty as dangerously final, opening up the possibility of innocent people irretrievably lost, of mistakes that can’t be taken back. And it is true that this happens: America has executed innocent people.
但派克的经历告诉我们，这并非死刑恐怖性的终点。还有更可怕的事情存在。
But Pike’s experience shows us that this is not the end of execution’s horror. There is something worse.
田纳西州已暂时中止执行死刑，州长也呼吁对派克处决过程中出现的问题进行审查。但他本应清楚问题出在哪里：致命注射程序的问题，乃至死刑制度本身更广泛的问题，早在田纳西州未能成功处决派克之前，就已不是什么秘密。
Tennessee has issued a temporary moratorium on executions, and the governor has called for a review of what went wrong in Pike’s execution. But he should know what went wrong: the problems with the lethal injection protocol, as well as with the death penalty more broadly, were not mysteries even before the state of Tennessee failed to kill Pike.
派克仍有可能不得不再次与命运抗争，以免被送回到执行室。而这正是死刑制度的另一项危害：其不公的重复性，以及它使我们无法从错误中吸取教训。
It is still possible that Pike will have to fight not to be sent back to the execution chamber again. And this is another harm of the death penalty: the repetitiveness of its injustice, the way it keeps us from learning from our mistakes.
我们很少有机会像对待派克这样的人那样，第二次做出正确的选择。田纳西州也不应获得第二次试图处死她的机会。莫伊拉·多尼根是《卫报》美国版专栏作家。
Rarely do we get a second chance to do right by someone like Pike. The state of Tennessee should not get a second chance to try to kill her. Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist